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As the beginning of quarter three begins, the students and staff at NCHS are being plagued with severe problems with manners. The school’s problems with manners are happening all day: kids being disruptful in the halls throughout the day, during lunch hours leaving the lunch room trashed, and even in the bathrooms where there is always a mess to be found after students leave. It’s highly disrespectful and our attitudes and manners need to start changing.

Currently a majority of ourproblems have been happening at lunch. You would think that with so many trashcans surrounding the lunchroom and areas around the building that students would learn that throwing their trash on the floor is unacceptable, but that is one of the main problems. Students are apparently having a hard time being able to throw away their trash after lunch with most of it being left on tables, on the floor, or being left only a foot away from the trash can. In an interview with one of NC’s cafeteria workers, Jill Padilla, she said “It’s very disrespectful… any which way you go there are garbages.” Mrs. Padilla is one of the women who clean up the cafeteria area after both freshman and upperclassmen lunches and takes pride in keeping the school clean.

Multiple problems involving manners can be found at freshman lunch. The changes to the lunch schedule from last year to this year have taken some getting used to. With the new schedule, freshmen head to their classes about halfway through upperclassmen C block, it is causing huge distractions for the upperclassman who are supposed to be focusing during class, but how can they with all of the noise?

After freshmen lunch, the cafeteria and surrounding areas look trashed. Even the plastic lunch trays that are bought using taxpayer money, our parents’ money, are being thrown away which causes the school to have to purchase more trays. We are even having to get trays that display other schools’ colors because of how many trays are being thrown away. Talking again to Jill Padilla, she said “If you are not willing to take your trays to the dish room, at least leave them on the table instead of on the floor or throwing them away.” There is usually trash littered all over the floor, left on tables and in the hallways. It has become a real problem, one that needs to stop now. The trash isn’t helping anyone out. It is just making it harder on our custodial staff who already work so hard to keep our school clean.

There is also a problem with how our bathrooms are being treated. Most of the time when you walk into the bathroom the first thing that you see is the trash can: sometimes overflowing, other times not. Sometimes there are used paper towels scattered all around it. As you continue in, if you look towards the ceiling you can sometimes see a used paper towel stuck to the ceiling. Now when you think of the bathrooms you don’t typically think of them as clean, but with the way that students are treating our bathrooms, it is downright disgusting. Along with all of that, it just causes our custodial staff to put in more work when they already have to; this is highly disrespectful.

Just walking around the school has become more and more of a hassle with students stopping in the middle of the hallways and making other students find an alternate way to get around them. It’s rude and can make getting to class during this year’s shortened passing period even more of an angering endeavor.

The problem with manners in our school has gotten out of control and something needs to be done about it. While most of our problems with manners are happening with freshmen, the problem with manners doesn’t just lie in their hands but also in the hands of upperclassmen as well. The disrespect that so many kids display is almost embarrassing. There was even an incident of disrespect by a freshman to a teacher in the elevator when the student wasn’t even meant to be in there. “The student was in the elevator during freshman lunch holding a tray with yogurt dripping off the side of it onto the floor and when I asked her to clean it up, the student argued and insisted the mess wasn’t theirs. The student also refused to clean it up,” said Ms. Gray.

If we don’t change our manners and our attitudes soon, then someone is going to start enforcing that we do, we know it will happen, why don’t we just change now so they don’t force us to in the future.